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©
Mari-Ann Herloff Mortensen 1999.
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Before extending my gratitude to the various people who have helped me complete the present thesis, I would like to thank the informants without whom it would not exist. I am eternally indebted to these men and women who trusted me - a total stranger - with their thoughts and emotions.
A number of organisations have been helpful with information and material concerning the Western Latvian communities in the West, particularly The World Federation of Free Latvians (Pasaules Brivo Latviesu Apvieniba). A warm thank you to the staff at the federation headquarters in Riga, who allowed me to use their small library and invited me to the "happy hour -parties". After returning to Denmark, I received material and assistance from Lettische Volksgemeinschaft in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and from Latviesu Nacionala Apvieniba Kanada (Latvian National Federation in Canada).
In Denmark, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, anthropologist Karen Fog Olwig, who has patiently and thoroughly read and commented on several drafts; and to anthropologist Steven Sampson who corrected my English. Sampson has, furthermore, been the driving force behind "Østeuropagruppen", an anthropological study group on Eastern Europe. The members of this group have been wonderful sources of inspiration, encouragement - and fun. They are: Pernille Hohnen, Anne Helbo Jespersen, Tom Trier, Mette Nordahl Svendsen, Peter Ulstrup Hansen, Rane Willerslev, Joel Leonard Katz and Mette Duekilde. Also members of this group are Christian Boehm, Kristina Grünenberg, Maj Olsen and Camilla Rosengaard, who have, furthermore, been my "response-group". They have read early drafts and I am grateful for their intelligent and inspiring comments. I still miss our sessions. I wish to extend a special thanks to Camilla Rosengaard, with whom I share both my interest in Latvia and various experiences in the field. Camilla has been a precious ally at all stages of the present thesis.
Finally, a loving thanks to my husband, Klaus, who has been unbelievably patient and supportive, and to my beautiful son, Konrad, who arrived in the middle of it all and put life and work in the right perspective.
Mari-Ann Herloff Mortensen
Copenhagen, April 1999
In late spring 1995, I went to the Annual Crafts Fair at the Open Air Ethnographic Museum outside Riga. It was a hot day. The Fair took place in a beautiful forest belonging to the Museum. Along the dusty paths lined with booths, a surprisingly large number of people walked slowly in the half-shadow of the trees. Here, local Latvians sold folkloristic artifacts - traditionally patterned silverware, amber artfully crafted in every conceivable way and leather belts, vests and book covers - to a crowd conspicuously dominated by visitors from the Western Latvian diaspora. In the forest space sound travelled far, and the air was filled with a hum of voices, often switching from English to Latvian and back.
I went to the Fair with Vizma, a thirty-two years old Canadian-Latvian woman who had told me that during her life in Toronto, she had heard her Latvian parents' wonderful stories about Latvia and that she had come to Latvia because she wanted to "return to the beautiful homeland" At the time of our trip to the Fair she had been living in Riga for eighteen months and was successfully making a career for herself as an attorney servicing international business corporations investing in Latvia. Nevertheless, she was seriously thinking about going back to Canada because she had difficulties dealing with what she called "the rudeness" of her local Latvian family. As we walked among the booths Vizma described her experience: "To begin with, I was absolutely euphoric. I felt like chatting to everybody simply because they spoke Latvian. I imagined us being like one big family and Latvia as our common home. It was wonderful. But I soon realized that Latvians from the West weren't Latvians in the eyes of the locals. To them, we are simply Westerners with money! They all wanted something from me. A video-recorder, a trip to Canada... We are like gold-dust to them. I usually say that in the beginning I trusted everybody, now I trust nobody! Just total mistrust! Because of my experiences with the locals I started wondering about the differences between us, about what it means to be Latvian at all. For sure, it doesn't mean the same to me as it does to them!"
Vizma interrupted herself, stopped at a booth, and started speaking Latvian to a girl selling amber and silver products. She asked her the price of an amber-bracelet, but the girl shook her head, signalling that she didn't understand what Vizma was saying. Eventually, after a few more tries, the girl insisted that they spoke in English. Vizma asked the price, got a quick answer and - gloomily - bought the amber bracelet she wanted. "God, sometimes they are so annoying!", she exclaimed. "They just won't let you speak Latvian. Like it's their language and not mine! I know that my Latvian is good, but often they just won't let you in. I really hate that ... being treated like a foreigner. I'm Latvian like they are!"
After a long, hot and dusty day at the fair we returned to Riga by bus. The ride depressed Vizma. "It is like going to the Soviet past," she said, "these are really the grey Soviet masses, it's terrible. These suburbs and the people really look like I always imagined Soviet Latvia to be."
We arrived at the center of Riga where Vizma lived, and she got off the crowded bus. She expressed her relief at leaving the "Stone age Soviet transportation system" and "all these pushy locals," and we parted. She went to her apartment in a beautiful and newly restored 18th century building situated in one of the Old Town squares. I left for the tram terminal.
While sitting in the tram, which noisily transported me to the apartment complex in which I lived, I looked at my fellow passengers and wondered about Vizma's remarks. Their appearances were not fashionable, but I found it hard to see them as "grey Soviet masses". As I travelled by tram every day, I saw them mainly as "ordinary people", many of whom, due to the fact that this particular day was a Saturday and the tram went to a large cemetery, were on their way to put flowers on the graves of loved ones.
I had rented a room in an apartment on the 9th floor, and - as the elevator was not working - fought my way up the stairs. Anna, my seventy years old local Latvian landlady, was at the door. Ignoring that I was sweaty and short of breath, she immediately wanted to know why I - once again - had been in the company of "one of those Americans". They can't tell you anything about Latvia, I have told you that!" I sat down on a chair in the hallway, and while trying to catch my breath, I told her about the Fair and about the purpose of my research, but Anna persisted: "I don't see why you want to talk to them. They only come in the summer period to buy things they can bring back to America. Last year, I had some people staying who came back from the Fair with several bags full of Latvian things ... costumes, amber, silver necklaces ... They don't want life here, they want things. They think those things make them Latvian, but they don't - and they are not Latvians, no matter what they tell you."
I gave up trying to argue with Anna about my motivations for talking to Western Latvians. Instead, I had a cup of coffee with her, listened to her views on the "Americans", took a cold shower and went to my room. Although exhausted, I had several hours of work left - fieldnotes, transcriptions, diary...
In April 1995, I arrived in Riga intending to study post-Soviet processes of identity formation in Latvia. In my project proposal, I suggested that this could be done by investigating how the resident Russian minority became what G.H. Mead (1934) termed "the significant Other" in Latvian narratives of identity. Furthermore, I wanted to investigate whether perceptions of this Russian Other depended on if informants had personal experiences with Russians. I therefore wanted to interview two categories of informants: local Latvians (who had this experience) and Latvians returning to Latvia from the West (who did not have this experience).
During my first week of research, however, local Latvian informants were more interested in criticizing the inclusion of the Western Latvians into my project than in elaborating on their perceptions of the Russian "Other". Often, they would say that the diaspora should be excluded from my study, as they were not "real Latvians". Talking with Western Latvian informants some of them told me, in tears, of their frustrations about "the locals".
At the time of my arrival, the relation between the returning Latvian diaspora and the local population was becoming strained. Western Latvians who returned to Latvia found it difficult to accept the reality of post-Soviet Latvia and its inhabitants. Local Latvians often dismissed the returnees as "rich foreigners" with whom they claimed to feel little or no affiliation.
Inspired - and encouraged - by informants and by the surge of emotions that seemed to surround the problem, I chose to redirect my research and concentrate on the encounter between the returning Western Latvian diaspora and the population of the newly independent Latvia. The initial framework (studying processes of identity-formation) was maintained, but concerning other "significant Others" and with a focus on intra-ethnic rather than inter-ethnic processes of identification. Furthermore, the theoretical framework was redesigned to include relevant problems related to the encounter: the meanings of place, global mobility (specifically the complex problems involved in "return") and the topography of power between East and West in the post-Soviet global space.
Most of the people I interviewed identified the problem of their encounter as disagreements about "Latvian identity" and its relation to place. Local Latvians were eager to convince me that the returnees had been living too long in a "wrong place" for them to be "real Latvians" anymore, and members of the diaspora would claim that the locals had lived in a "wrong Latvia" - Soviet Latvia - and therefore they were no longer possessing "the true Latvian identity".
When discussing who were "real" Latvians, local and Western Latvians created elaborated narratives on identity. These narratives are the main data of the present analysis, which aims at: (a) discussing how the relation between place and identity is thematized and made meaningful in local and diasporic narrative practices, (b) how these meanings are contested and negotiated, and, finally, (c) how the narratives are related to various characteristics of the specific context of the encounter. In order to investigate these questions, the thesis is structured as follows: Chapter One provides background information on the setting of my fieldwork and on methodology. Chapter Two, "Narratives, Place and Identity", introduces narratives as an analytical perspective within anthropology. Furthermore, recent debates concerning the relation between place, culture and identity, as well as contributions to the study of nationalism relevant to the analysis are outlined and discussed. Chapter Three, "Routes and Routines", focuses on narratives of spatial practices ("travelling" and "dwelling"). The chapter analyses how informants render experiences of places meaningful in terms of identity. Chapter Four, "Only the Transitory Has to Shout", analyzes narratives of thematized cultural practices ("silence" and "articulation"). These themes are central to a narrative construction of "Otherness" existing prior to the encounter and the uses of these themes are analyzed as strategic retellings and reinterpretations of this narrative. Chapter Five, "East and West - Rejoined with a Vengeance", relates local and diasporic narratives to questions of political, economical and discursive power and discusses the implications of trying to define an "authoritative telling" of Latvian identity in post-Soviet Latvia. The central theme in this chapter is how the encounter between local and Western Latvians was influenced by the relation between "East" and "West". The sixth and final chapter, "Homo Nationalis vs. Homo Globalis", reflects upon the implications of the present analysis on anthropological theoretical debates.
Geographically, Latvia is located South of Estonia and North of Lithuania. Throughout history, these three Baltic states have separated the great Russian mainland from the Baltic Sea and Europe, and have constituted gateways to this mainland for various European powers. Consequently, from the 12th century and until 1918, Latvia was under the domination of mainly Germany and Russia, both with profound interests in possessing this gateway, and thus becoming the two "significant Others" of Latvian historical consciousness. Until 1991, Latvia existed as an independent, geographically distinct nation-state only during The First Republic (1918-1940).(1)
In 1940 Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were annexed by the Soviet Union as a result of the secret protocol attached to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, in which the Baltic states were classified as Soviet "sphere of interest" (cf. Hiden & Salmon 1992).(2)
After the war, as the Allied forces negotiated the geopolitical division of Europe, the political fact of the Soviet presence in the Baltic states - combined with an Allied acceptance of the secret protocol - turned the Baltic States into three new Soviet Socialist Republics.
The Soviet annexation initiated forty-five years of profound changes in Latvia, of which the demographic changes alone were immense. On the one hand, a large number of Russians settled in the country. They were administrative and military personnel as well as workers needed in the heavy industrialization initiated during Stalin's rule (see appendix A). On the other hand, about 150.000 Latvians were deported to Russia, and an estimated 200.000 escaped to the West to avoid deportation or other forms of persecution by the Soviet state. These refugees were primarily members of the bourgeoisie, or, in the phrase of one of my Western Latvian informants, "the cream of the crop" - teachers, musicians, well-off farmers, store-owners, clerks and white-collar workers (Wyman 1989, Bilmanis 1947, Spekke 1951). The result of these demographic changes was that by 1993, official statistics listed Latvia's population as 54% ethnic Latvian and 46% non-Latvian (S. Y. L. 1993).
The changes taking place in Latvian life during the years of occupation were multifaceted and complex. Most descriptions of life in the Soviet Union concentrate on large-scale characteristics of the communist system: the totalitarian state, plan economy, bureaucracy, censorship, etc. In Latvia, as in the rest of the Soviet Union, the Russian language was introduced within state administration, schools, shops, etc. The country was industrialized and individual farms and businesses were collectivized or nationalized. The independent government was replaced by national administrative branches of the Soviet bureaucracy which, to a large extent, was controlled from Moscow. The question remains how "Soviet life"was lived in practice. How it was interpreted and made meaningful by those who lived it? Sources are limited when it comes to "thick descriptions" (Geertz 1973:6) of the lives of the inconspicuous - those who were not elite apparatchiks, victims of the Gulag, dissidents, intellectuals - those often depicted as the grey and oppressed masses. The few sources available describe how Soviet society became divided into formal/informal or public/private spheres, suggesting that in the public sphere, people used practices of manipulation and strategic mirroring of the conduct coveted by the state. In the private sphere, people learned how to make ends meet; how to obtain information about new shipments of shoes, socks, sugar; how to get the materials to build your house; how to keep your car running without the authorized spare parts, etc. (cf. Kenedi 1981, Simecka 1984, Wedel 1986, Shlapentokh 1989). However, critics suggest that this separation between public and private has been represented as too rigid. To some extent, the public sphere was an integrated part of people's everyday life, and they interpreted parts of their practices within this sphere as meaningful rather than as mere performance. On the other hand, state control and communist values did influence the private sphere (cf. Boym 1994, Borneman 1992). Although the strategic and manipulative practices of people within the Soviet Union are well documented, this seems to have baffled Western scientists so much that they have ignored the fact that many people either internalized the values of the state, or saw them simply as the framework of their everyday lives.(3)
One aspect of Soviet life that had been known in the West for years before the final collapse of the U.S.S.R. was the existence of dissent, a knowledge often provided by exiled dissidents. These people wrote of the horrors of the communist regime, of deportations and violations of human rights, of censorship and of the problems of belonging to the national minorities within the Soviet Union (cf. Solzhenitsyn 1963, Sinka 1988, Bilmanis 1951). In Latvia, the increasing popular resistance was based on a very persistent nationalism, which fought Soviet ideological claims that national identities should be replaced by a united and homogeneous identity - that of Homo Sovieticus (cf. Lieven 1992). It is beyond the scope of the present study to elaborate in any great detail on the issue of dissent within the Soviet Union.(4) Suffice it to say that in the period between 1985 and 1991 a widespread and popular form of dissent "erupted unto the social surface" in Latvia (Shtromas 1994: 106).(5) Thus, after forty-five years of Soviet rule - on August 21, 1991 - the Latvian Supreme Council declared Latvia to be independent. The same year, on September 6, Mikhail Gorbachev recognized the claims to independence made by the Baltic states, and Latvia became a truly independent state, to which the large number of Latvians who had lived in exile could return.
During the Soviet occupation 100,000 Latvians lived in the U.S.A., and an additional 88,000 in other Western countries (Sinka 1988: 51).(6) Furthermore, an estimated 50,000-100,000 deportees and their descendants lived within the territory of the former Soviet Union. In total, a quarter of a million Latvians lived outside Latvian territory, a large number considering the total Latvian population within Latvia of 1.391.469 (S. Y. L.1993).(7)
The exact number of Western Latvians living in Latvia during my fieldwork was unknown. Most of the returnees had Latvian citizenship and disappeared into the statistical category of "Latvians", and no official body in Latvia or in the host countries registered their movements. In the present context, however, the crucial matter was the fact that local Latvians regarded them as a different and significant category. For example, local informants believed that the number of returnees was rather large. The lowest estimate of Western Latvians in Latvia suggested to me by a local informant was 10,000 persons and the highest 100,000. Generally, local estimates were between 30,000 and 50,000, while Western Latvian informants estimated that between 3,000 and 7,000 returnees were in Latvia on a more or less permanent basis. However, during Easter celebrations and the summer holidays, informants suggested, an additional 10,000 - 20,000 Western Latvians would come as visitors or tourists.
To both the returnees living in Latvia and to those visiting during the holidays, a common experience was that the Latvia they encountered was rather different from that which they had known or heard of in the diaspora.
In 1995, Latvia was "in transition" from communist plan-economy and centralized state control to market economy (capitalism), and a political system based on democratic principles of political legitimacy. In Latvia, the national euphoria had subsided and many Latvians had profound difficulties finding economic security and meaning in the midst of the restructuring. At an official level, the Latvian government attempted to bridge the nationalist promises of independence with the new reality of security worries and vast social and economical problems. Some of the problems affecting Latvia in 1995 were decreasing living standards and average life spans, worsening public health, alcoholism, skyrocketing suicide rates, and a process of social differentiation so inflated that it has been termed "hyper-stratification" (LHDR 1996).(8)
During my fieldwork, Latvia's largest bank Banka Baltija, collapsed, plunging the country into a period of financial crisis and instability. Furthermore, Latvia suffered from other "usual transition problems" (ibid.), such as inefficient government institutions, widespread political passivity, corruption of the judicial system and the police force, and a "shadow" economy estimated to account for 14-30 percent of the Latvian economy (ibid.). In general, the Latvia to which the Western Latvians returned and to which I arrived in 1995 was a changing society struggling with a variety of very serious problems.
The present study is based on a one-week pilot study in Riga, Latvia in December 1994 and three months of fieldwork in April-July 1995. The fieldwork consisted of different forms of data collection as well as ongoing evaluation of methods and data (see Appendix B).
Participant observation: anthropologist and "Westerner"
During my fieldwork, I lived with a local Latvian woman in her flat outside the city center, taking part in her everyday life. Although my lack of language skills limited my access to public life, I participated by shopping at the market, travelling by tram, discussing where to find affordable shoes, etc. However, I was - occasionally - able to purchase "Western" products in the new supermarkets rather than shopping for local goods at the market. Thus, my financial status was somewhere in-between informants', as I had a lot more money than the locals and quite often a lot less than the Western Latvians. These experiences of being "a lot poorer than" or "wealthier than" were often described as being important in the relation between the groups. Apart from this type of experience, I also covered the "middle ground" when it came to other advantages and difficulties of being either local or Western. In some situations I had the advantage of being a Westerner, while in others it made life more difficult. In the latter case, I often experienced being cheated by taxi-drivers or being denied access to local knowledge on various issues. I did not, however, live a segregated life as a Westerner in Latvia. I had local Latvian friends who included me in various aspects of their everyday lives (going to government offices to renew drivers licenses, shopping for grandparents' birthday gifts, meeting friends at inconspicuous cafés where coffee was bad, but affordable). Whether I had my foot in one world or the other, I gained insight into some of the issues which either local or Western Latvians emphasized as being crucial to their life in Riga.
Besides this everyday participation, I also attended various private and public events, such as birthday parties, the Annual Crafts Fair at the Ethnographic Open Air Museum, the British Council Movie Nights and the weekly "Aliens-Night" at the Rozamunde café - all of which provided the opportunity to meet informants and collect a substantial amount of valuable data.(9)
Although I attempted to participate as extensively as possible in the everyday lifeworlds of both groups of informants, and obtained valuable data in this way, I remained alert to the fact that my presence sometimes affected the interviewees or the events in which I participated. I therefore kept an eye on the various ways I was perceived and categorized and on how these perceptions affected my work. The category which seemed to preoccupy local informants more than my status as a woman, Dane or anthropologist, and which I was consistently placed in was that of a "Westerner". Often, I felt that local informants almost expected me to be arrogant, self-absorbed, condescending, critical of everything they did - and filthy rich! I therefore spent some time at the beginning of each interview chatting and attempting to present a different image. I did not dress expensively or fashionably, and tried in every way to avoid being included in the negative category of "Westerners". The fact that I was Scandinavian would occasionally make local informants suggest that I understood them better than "the Americans" did, as they regarded Latvia as being part of the "Scandinavian culture". When I interviewed Western Latvian informants, however, I would either be perceived as "one of us" or "another one of us (European as opposed to American or Australian) or as "another nosy student" (by the older generation of American Latvians who generally dislike what they perceive as "leftist European students"). In general, my reflexivity on the relations between informants and myself provided a heightened sensitivity toward and important data about various categories and their significance in the Latvian social sphere.
The core of my fieldwork material consists of forty-two interviews (twenty-three with Western Latvians and nineteen with local Latvians), as well as a number of informal conversations. Furthermore, the material is observations registered in fieldnotes or diary-entries, documents obtained from various sources in the field, especially from the World Federation of Free Latvians, and email or telephone correspondence with informants after my departure from Latvia.(10)
During the fieldwork, informants were found in a variety of ways. Some were found by chance, some I contacted because they worked in places with a mixed local/diasporic staff, and yet others were found by my interpreter within her personal networks, asking fellow students if they or their parents were interested.(11) The main criterion for including local informants into my study was whether they had experiences with Western Latvians and were willing and able to talk about it. These experiences varied from occasional meetings with relatives from the West to being colleagues with Western Latvians. Eventually, I made contact with a substantial network of informants. The informants were men and women, young and old, but with only a few exceptions almost all well educated. It is important to note, however, that although local informants were well educated, they only rarely occupied positions normally corresponding to such levels of education.This is why I have chosen not to use the term "middle class" about local informants. Most of them had severe difficulties making ends meet and did not maintain the living standards usually associated with middle class status. The differences in age, gender, etc., which existed among informants proved to have no significant or systematic implications on their narratives on place and identity.
Western Latvian informants were usually found through the Western Latvian network, and were chosen using similar criteria: they had to have some personal contact with local Latvians. Their recommendations proved to be valuable data, as I found that, despite denials of the existence of such "networks", most Western Latvians recommended that I talked to other Western Latvians, despite the fact that I would ask for either local or Western Latvian contacts. Using the same definition of this category as in the case of local informants, I would characterize most Western Latvian informants as well educated. However, in their case, there was a much larger degree of correspondence between their level of education and level of income than was the case among local informants, a fact to which I return in Chapter Five.
The majority of interviews with informants took place in cafés or at their places of work. Local informants preferred not to meet in their private homes, which, according to themselves was because I was a Westerner (by definition accustomed to glamorous homes) and they were "poor". Even my most persistent attempts to convince them that their homes were probably nicer than mine would not change their minds.(12) However, a few informants eventually invited me into their homes and private lives, and they became both key informants and personal friends. I use a broad definition of "key informant" similar to that suggested by Bernard (1994). In his words key informants are "people who you can talk to easily, who understand the information you need, and who are glad to give it to you or find it for you."(ibid.: 166). However, as Ellen (1984) suggests, key informants can sometimes bring more harm than happiness to the anthropologist's work if he or she becomes associated with informants who are marginalized or controversial (ibid.: 224). Anna, my 70 year-old local Latvian hostess was a controversial key informant.(13) She was a retired author of children's books, called herself my "Latvian grandmother" and I came to love her somewhat eccentric personality. During the Soviet occupation Anna had been a member of the Latvian communist intellectual elite. Her late husband, who died in 1989, was a famous pro-Soviet author, which led them both to be regarded as "traitors" to the Latvian national cause - a fact that filled Anna with bitterness towards the new elite.
Apart from taking part in Anna's life, I had daily conversations with her about virtually everything, sitting in her large apartment overflowing with books and paintings, many of which were present from friends and thus remnants of a life in the intellectual elite. Our conversations would give me insight into the degradation of the old elite, and into how these changes were experienced by that elite. Furthermore, she translated radio and television broadcasts and we discussed the daily news. Since Anna rented rooms to predominantly Western Latvians on holiday, she had a broad experience with this group. Yet, due to her past and her marginalized and controversial position, I considered it best that neither local nor Western Latvian informants were told with whom I lived.(14)
Another key informant was my interpreter, Aija, a 23-year-old student of philosophy with a passion for sociology - and now for anthropology. Our cooperation quickly developed into a warm friendship based on mutual respect and shared enthusiasm for my project. She worked diligently to help me gain access to both informants and information, and she translated, explained and contextualized my data. Without her, many subtle points would have been lost on me. Furthermore, she worked as a volunteer in an NGO employing both local and Western Latvians, and provided valuable data on local experiences of having a Western Latvian boss.
Finally, I wish to introduce two Western Latvian informants included in the "key" category. One is Inese, a Canadian-Latvian woman of 34, whom I met at the Rozamunde's café and who became both a friend and a helpful informant. She had been in Latvia for two years at the time of my arrival and was profoundly interested in and reflexive about the relationship between the returning diaspora and the local Latvians. She had no formal education, had spent some time studying art history in Toronto, and was working as a barmaid in an Irish Pub in Riga. Inese positioned herself critically towards the Canadian-Latvian community and was acutely observant, reflective and articulate.(15) She introduced me to one of her good friends, Andrejs, a 32-year-old gay man born and raised by Latvian parents in Los Angeles, California. Andrejs came to Latvia in 1994 on a Lutheran mission project and stayed in the country after the project was terminated. At the time of my fieldwork he did not have a job and - as far as I could tell from his rather vague answers to such questions - lived off money sent by his parents. He had quite a large number of local Latvian relatives whom he had only known for a few years and with whom he socialized only on special occasions. He described himself as "a fierce patriot - both Latvian and American". Like Inese, he had dropped out of college, and had spent a few years studying Latvian history, mythology and folklore on his own - as well as participating passionately in American-Latvian song festivals, summer camps and other cultural events. Thus, he was what Ellen calls "the well-informed informant" (1984: 225) within the specific field of diasporic cultural practices.
I consider myself very lucky to have met and worked with these four informants. They were competent, reflexive and interested, being "experts" in their own right as individuals positioned in specific ways to my field of interest. Anna with her life entwined with the Soviet past now hosting Western returnees and Aija with her experiences of the Western Latvian "work force" - both being immersed into a local life world, in which they willingly included me. Inese would elaborate on diasporic life from a critical perspective, while Andrejs would talk for hours on end from an "inside" perspective - although he occasionally also agreed with Inese's criticism.
In the previous sections, I have used the terms "local" and "Western" Latvians when describing my informants. However, to avoid essentializing these categories, some remarks must be made on how and why I use them. The point to be made is that these categories are both descriptive (or ethnographic) and analytical.
In the present context, the term "locals" is used both ethnographically (as the term used by both groups of informants) and analytically - in the sense that it also draws attention to the cultural construction of place vs. displacement. Though both groups categorize the "locals" as such, the meanings attached to the term vary significantly.
The label of "Western Latvians" was subject to political and social negotiation. Local informants often used the terms "American Latvians" or "emigrants" - terms which many Western Latvian informants found offensive. The term "emigrants" connoted to some that their departure from Latvia was voluntary and permanent, which upset most Western Latvian informants. Neither German-Latvians, British- nor Canadian-Latvians liked being included in the category of "American-Latvians".(16) I have chosen to use the term Western Latvians partly because most informants seemed to take no offense by it and partly in order to highlight the fact that the "Westernness" of the returnees was a significant issue in the relation between the two groups. In certain contexts I use the terms "diaspora" or "diasporic" to describe the Western Latvians as a group, in order to draw analytical attention to the diasporic experiences or mythologies of displacement and return and to their implications on individual narratives of place and identity.(17)
According to informants, the distinction between "Western" and "Local" Latvians was meaningful only within the context of their encounter with each other. Whenever they described themselves in other contexts, they said, both groups simply used the term "Latvian". However, although informants differed in various ways, it soon became apparent that the only difference which influenced the structure and contents of the narratives significantly was whether one was "local" or "Western". I return to narratives as an analytical field in the next chapter, where the more general theoretical framework of the analysis is introduced.
The theoretical fields which have inspired the conceptual framework of this study are the anthropological conceptualization of relations between place and identity and recent contributions to the study of nationalism. However, as the present analysis focuses on how informants attempted to create coherent narratives of their own "Latvianness" and through this narrativization made their experience of places meaningful, I will start by discussing my approach to the analysis of narratives.
Narratives are not objective or "neutral" representations of life, reality or experience, they are ordered and means of ordering and making sense of an otherwise disordered world. Thus, telling stories is a practice which provides the anthropological analysis with a possible insight into processes of sense or order "in the making" and into processes of identification. In Riessman's words: "Human agency and imagination determine what gets included and excluded in narrativization, how events are plotted, and what they are supposed to mean. Individuals construct past events and actions in personal narratives to claim identities and construct lives" (1993:2).
In his analysis of narratives, Edward Bruner creates a distinction between "life as lived (reality), life as experienced (experience), and life as told (expression)" (Bruner 1986a: 6). The concept of experience can be further subdivided into "experience" and "an experience", where the former is the temporal flow of life "received by the individual consciousness" and the latter is the "intersubjective articulation of experience" which transforms the flow of experience into tellable units (ibid.: 6). This study focuses on narratives as experience expressed in tellable units, and on how these units are selected to form a coherent story. First, however, it is necessary to focus on the "tellable" units, on that which is included in the narratives and on how they are structured.
In most anthropological writings narratives are defined as "stories" involving a syntactic structure of temporal sequence (cf. Bruner 1986a, Peacock & Holland 1993). These are structures such as past-present-future, "beginning-middle-end" or "situation-transformation-situation" (Scholes 1981: 206). Furthermore, Bruner separates narrative into three key elements: story, defined as "narrative structure" and the "abstract sequence of events, systematically related", discourse which he defines as "the particular medium in which the story is manifested", and telling, which he defines as "the act of narrating" or "the communicative process that produces the story in discourse" (1986b:145).
When I use "discourse" it is defined somewhat broader than in Bruner's conceptualization, where the term covers merely manifestations, "the statement in a particular medium such as a novel, myth, lecture, film, conversation, or whatever" (ibid.: 145). However, various authors inspired by Foucault suggest that discourse should be regarded as complex expressive practices which "systematically form the object of which they speak" (Mogensen 1995: 21). Thus, discourse is not merely a field of expressions - it is also a practice forming the world, defining it and determining what can be said and thought about it. Thus, power to define and resistance to definitions are integrated aspects of discourse (cf. Foucault 1970).(18) Narratives are thus individual expressions, manifestations in discourse, as Bruner states, but they are also manifestations of discourse. In their narratives, individuals express their experience of discursive practices, and in the telling, they transform it - however slightly. Every narrative positions itself in discourse and as discourse, by expressing experience in a continuum ranging from confirmation to challenge of discourse.
However, although it does play a subordinate part, discourse is not in itself the subject matter of this study. Here, the main focus is on narrative structure - on how informants structure their narratives of being or becoming "Latvian". My analysis of narrative structure identifies the units of the narrative structure as being thematic rather than temporal (beginning-middle-end, etc.).
Nigel Rapport defines narratives as "stories people tell about themselves and their worlds"(1996: 7). In their telling, narratives embody and maintain a perceived order "despite seeming temporal, spatial and experiential disjunctures" (ibid.: 7). As suggested above, periodic sequentiality (past-present-future) is one such form of order. However, Rapport introduces another type of narrative ordering of experience, which can be termed thematic. Rapport is inspired by Levi-Strauss' concept of 'mythemes', defined as "elements of plot, of characterization, of symbolization and symbolic opposition" from which all myths are composed (ibid.: 12). Rapport offers a "conceptualization of 'nar-themes' (narrative themes) or 'con-themes' (conversational themes) operating on the level of the individual" (ibid.: 12). By introducing the concept of nar-themes, Rapport emphasizes individual and conscious practices of ordering experience, and thus opposes Levi-Strauss' structuralist position, from which the practice of thematization through mythemes is seen as large-scale and static representations of the social world, which express themselves through passive (or "unconscious") individuals.
The focus on narrative thematization is reverberated by John Borneman, who states that individuals "[…] do not include all experiences or events in their stories, but rather select specific nodes which are for them the most significant in constructing a coherent narrative" (Borneman 1992: 37). Some experiences are thus emphasized as more meaningful than others. Borneman defines these as "experiential tropes", which constitute narrative "devices" for structuring experience. Linking Rapport's and Borneman's conceptualizations I will base my analysis on the practice of narrative thematization. I do this to include in the analysis those aspects of informants' experience which they themselves select as significant. Informants consistently referred to specific themes of experience which broke temporal chronology. The narratives were to a large degree structured by these themes, around which informants constructed a temporal bricolage of past, present and future. However, although I did not share past experiences with informants, I shared various present experiences with them and could put their narrativization into perspective. Thus, by combining participant observation in the present with various sources on the historical past to which informants referred it became possible to identify relevant experiences which had been omitted from informants narratives.
Although the present analysis focuses on individual narratives, most of the emphasized themes were also - to a certain extent - shared. "Travelling" is thus an analytical theme which I have introduced in order to show how not just one but many informants focus on this type of practice as crucial to their experience. Thus, although "travel" is an individual experiential theme, it is included in the analysis because it is not just individual.
I have chosen to conceptualize such shared narrative structurings of experience as "dominant narratives". In his article "Ethnography as Narrative", Bruner defines "dominant narrative" as "foregrounded in a historical era" (1986b: 150). Although the author recognizes that other narrative structures exist, he still insists that one narrative structure "dominates" at any given time. However, this definition can be challenged at various levels. In my view, the concept suffers from a problem of scale. Bruner's "dominant narrative" describes a relation of domination between global centers and peripheries, leaving no space for local, coexisting or competing narratives of individual experience.(19) The problem of scale is connected to another problem, namely Bruner's conceptualization of the word "dominant". In his use "dominant" signifies both quantity (many similarly structured narratives) and relations of power (one narrative structure "dominates" by being connected to various power-structures). There is no clear distinction between quantity and power. As such, for the present analysis, it is useful to define dominant narratives quantitatively, that is, on the basis of the fact that they are shared, that a given narrative structure is repeated in many individual narratives. This repetition is independent of scale and can signify both large scale (or "global") and small scale (or "local") tellings. Used here, the term "dominant narrative" thus implies that a significant number of informants tended to structure their narratives by similar themes. This definition leaves space for both individual experience and for coexisting and competing narratives - in this case the two dominant narrative structures termed "local Latvian" and "Western Latvian".(20)
Dominant narratives - of course - are not detached from relations of power. What I wish to emphasize is the fact that using "dominant" (when signifying both shared and powerful) obscures the dynamics of power, its negotiable and processual aspects. Therefore, I suggest that we reserve different terms for the aspects of narrativization associated with institutions of or struggles for power. A term highlighting the relation between narratives and power is suggested by Bruner and Gorfain, namely authoritative tellings, which "sound like the words of fathers, adults, leaders, and teachers; they represent 'the official line' and are sponsored by or associated with the state". (Bruner & Gorfain 1984: 59). However, the authors suggest that the power of the state rests on its ability to make its "authoritative telling" dominant, i.e., widely reproduced.
In one sense, the power of the authoritative versions derives from the power of the state, but in another, deeper sense each authoritative telling of a national story constitutes the power of the state. Accordingly, it follows that each critical, challenging telling may be perceived as an attack on the authority of the state, on the authority of the official tellers, and on the authority of "the story". The dialogue of ideolects and ideologies embodies more than a conflict of power; the dialogue also tests the way power is defined, displayed, recognized, and changed - through narration. Every performance, then, not only expresses power but also creates it [ibid.: 59].
In reality, dominant and authoritative are not detached. When a narrative structure is "dominant", i.e., told by several people, it does hold some authority in the eyes of the tellers. However, other groups of people may recognize this narrative as dominant, but as devoid of authority. Thus, my use of the term "authoritative" emphasizes the dynamics of power struggles in narrativization. Whereas the concept "dominant" connotes a very static definition of power, "authority" opens the possibility of identifying different degrees or types of power. One type of authority exists within the group reproducing a dominant narrative, as a number of people recognize the telling as authoritative.(21) However, this authority may not be solidified in discourse, i.e., recognized by other people telling other narratives, or sponsored by institutionalized bodies of power, such as the state. Furthermore, although institutionalized, narratives of the state are not necessarily dominant - as was the case with the Soviet state narrative of national identity (cf. Jespersen 1999). Analyzing the specific relation between types of authority - be it that associated with the state, with subject positions, or with the fact that some narratives are dominant within certain groups - is a task which lies beyond the scope of the present study. Here, I analyze struggles to solidify the authority attached to different dominant narratives within discourse. By conceptually separating the dominant (shared) from the powerful (authoritative), it becomes possible to analyze struggles for power or authority between coexisting dominant narratives within any given discourse and historical context, and to conceptualize dominant narratives which are shared, but not necessarily or by definition powerful.
Narrative, context and culture
By analyzing narratives we gain insight into how people's experiences of life are being ordered, structured and invested with meaning. Narratives are not "static" expressions of experience. They are constant and dynamic reshaping, restructuring, re-tellings of the flow of experience, and analyzing narratives thus includes the processual nature of human existence. Stories are constantly retold, and in the act of telling, former versions are related to new realities in a reflexive process which transforms the story. Narratives thus imply both synchronic reflexivity (the here-and-now-ness and context of the telling, relationship between narrator and listener) and diachronic reflexivity (structuring the relation between past, present and an anticipated future; relating to previous tellings, etc.).
The narratives analyzed below were also retellings in a particular context. My fieldwork was conducted at a time and place in which the problems of the encounter between local and Western Latvians were just emerging in discourse. In some respect, this "emergence" was in a very small way enhanced by my probing into the problem. The interview situation created a frame of reference for informants' tellings in the sense that they all knew of my interest in the encounter. Therefore, it is crucial that the narratives analyzed below are understood as complex, relational, situational and dynamic representations of experience and identity, framed by the interview situation which prompted informants' reflections on the 1995 context of the encounter between the two groups.
However the narratives were not completely new, nor were they simple responses to my questions. They were manifestations of an ongoing reflexive process initiated by the return of the Western Latvians. The actual encounter was a new reality, which informants reflected upon and to which former narratives of place and identity were related. The first were instances of synchronic reflexivity, the latter of "diachronic reflexivity". Furthermore, by relating the narratives of informants to my own experiences and fieldwork observations, I am able to contextualize these narratives in ways which, as suggested earlier, prove how narrative is also a dynamic process of actively omitting specific experience from the telling. Thus, by practicing reflexivity in the present text, I can suggest possible reasons why some themes were conspicuously absent from the dominant narratives.
The importance of contextualizing narratives brings us to the question of how narratives are related to the concept of culture. In Bruner's and Gorfain's words, "every telling responds to and helps to condition its cultural and historical context" (1984:60). However, narratives and culture exist at quite different levels. Narratives are empirical practices observable to the anthropologist, while culture is an "analytical implication" (Hastrup 1989: 14) - an "invisible" space of meaning which is implied by narrative and other practices (Rosengaard 1998: 9). However, this space is also created by narratives and other practices, as each telling attempts to define how human experience can or should be interpreted and made meaningful. An individual who narrates his or her life (and experiences) "reflects upon the prevailing theories of 'possible' lives that are part of one's culture" (J. Bruner 1981: 15). Hence, "[…] the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and to purpose-build the very 'events' of a life" (ibid.: 15). Narratives are both affected by and affect the world; they are practices implicating culture and part of its constitutive processes through the re-creation, re-shaping and re-interpretation of meanings and relations. My narrative analysis thus rests on a conceptualization of culture as an implicational space of meanings and relations realized in dynamic and processual practices (such as narratives) - rather than as an empirical entity (such as "society") defined by the elements forming it and determining all its manifestations. Or, as Bruner states: "retellings are what culture is all about" (1986a:17).
As suggested, what was retold in the narratives analyzed in the present context was the relation between place and identity. However, as these are central concepts within anthropological theory, it is necessary to situate the present study and its field within anthropological discourse.
Recently, the anthropological analytical object of "culture" has been criticized as being constructed as identical with "a society precisely located in space and time" which was perceived as internally homogeneous (Augé 1995: 49). This compartmentalization of the world was part and parcel of Western nationalist thinking, through which the junction of territory, people and culture became almost commonsensical. However, this is also "an ideal type of twentieth century disciplinary anthropology" (Clifford 1992: 97). The former anthropological concept of placebound and static culture may not be as solid as the deconstructivist authors represent it. Anthropologist Hans-Rudolf Wicker suggests that it may be partially constructed - in order for it to be deconstructed. He believes, that Boas' conceptualization of culture was based on perceptions of complexity and change, culture as "a kaleidoscopic picture of miscellaneous traits" (Wicker 1996: 12). It is certainly true that the isomorphism of culture and place has been questioned for some time. However, the almost paradigmatic anthropological emphasis on hybridity, transnationality and human agency in peoples relations to places is relatively recent, and stems - in part - from critiques directed at the nationalist idea of placebound identity and culture.(22)
One such critique springs from a focus on the de - and reterritorialization of culture in processes of globalization; i.e., the - presumably increasing - global interconnectedness through communication, media and travel. Within most globalization theories, culture is understood through metaphors such as "flows", "streams" or "scapes" of cultural artifacts, traditions, services, commodities, ideas and images, usually with an emphasis of the relation between the local and the global in these processes (cf. Hannerz 1992, Barth 1989, Appadurai 1991). Culture is conceptualized in terms of process, human agency and cultural construction rather than in terms of fixity, passive cultural subjects or place-bound "scripts" determining meaning and practice.
Another critique of the notion of placebound culture comes from a renewed focus on the de- and reterritorialization of people and the research into the processes and experience of displacement among mainly diasporas, migrants and refugees (cf. Gupta & Ferguson 1992; Lavie & Swedenburg 1996; Malkki 1992, 1994; Hastrup & Olwig 1997). These studies have highlighted a number of analytical limitations inherent in the paradigm described above. The authors suggest that we leave the idea that the relation between people and a given place can be regarded as "natural". People's attachments to places demand constant construction and reproductions of the meanings attached to the place itself as well as to the meaning of their relation to the place. "Locatedness" always implies a practice of providing a place with the status of being "some-where", a locality to which one can be related. The static conceptualization of place and culture does not provide theoretical tools useful for the study of people inhabiting borderlands or - zones. It often fails to account for differences within a locality and it provides no tools for "dealing with relations that extend beyond the defined area" (Hastrup & Olwig 1997: 2). Moreover, places are not constructed within a politically neutral global (or local) space. Gupta and Ferguson (1992:8) suggest that we increase our sensitivity to the global "system of hierarchically organized spaces" in which places are constructed. They note that nationalist spatial organization has "enabled the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power".
The present study positions itself in various ways in relation to these writings. One problem is that - with very few exceptions (cf. Safran 1991, Bruner 1996) - they rarely address conflicts between homeland populations and diasporas/migrants/refugees, as if these relations were unproblematic. In the present study, however, it is imperative to remain sensitive to the fact that "important tensions may arise when places that have been imagined at a distance must become lived spaces" (Gupta & Ferguson 1992: 11). Homeland populations sometimes enhance these tensions by rejecting the returnees. Another difference between the present study and other writings on migrants/diasporas is that they almost all describe what anthropologist Jonathan Schwartz terms the "sending village" and the "receiving metropole" as the two "ends in the migration chain" (Schwartz 1997: 255). In short, these writings often reproduce a master narrative of displacement which I would call "Heading Hopefully North" (Chambers 1994: 6).(23) The focus is often almost exclusively on migration from the Third World to the First World and on the experience of migrants within their new (often Western) host societies. In the present case, Western Latvians travel from the First to the Second World, which implies power relations different from those experienced by, for example, Mexican or Sikh migrants to the USA (cf. Mankekar 1994). There is quite a difference between the poor seeking relief or opportunity in the world's economic centers, and well-off Western Latvians visiting their economically weak homeland in search of their roots. What is different is the context of this movement, namely, the topography of power between East and West constituted by the post-Soviet global space.
As with "culture", Hans-Rudolf Wicker states that "identity is no longer defined as a state of being but of becoming. Identity is to be fitted with the attributes of the multifarious, the incomplete and the hybrid" (1996: 17-19). Identity is always in the making and it is important to make a distinction between the static categories of identity used by informants and our analytical approach to such categories. Thus, when I use the concept of "national identity" in this study, it is ethnographically, i.e., as something informants talk about, while the analytical position is, that while talking of "identity" they are engaged in processes of identification.
However, whenever the concepts of "ethnic" or "national" identity are used, there is always the danger of essentializing collectivities (cf. Wicker 1996).(24) This "danger" may be due to a paradox inherent in the anthropological Zeitgeist: we have moved away from essentialist description, without substituting this with a convincing alternative terminology describing process and flexibility (ibid.: 10). Our critique of the concepts of culture and identity results in a blindness to the systematic restrictions of the social field which are experienced by most individuals. Fundamental to this problem is that although identity and culture are to be understood as processes of cultural construction, we still need terms which account for the obvious existence of order. We must recognize that cultural constructions are not arbitrary illusions. Constructions or not, national identities and national communities are experienced as natural facts which do not change merely because scientists prove that they are not primordial or biological. The difference between perceived order and processes of ordering is reflected in the narrative approach, with its emphasis on the ordering practice involved in the telling of stories.
My choice of "national identity" as a description of the narrative battleground of local and Western Latvians is not arbitrary. National discourse implicitly emphasizes place, which was also a recurring theme in informants' narratives. As Michael Billig states: "nationalism is never 'beyond geography'" (1995: 74). Nationalism generates the idea of "homeland", the unity and singularity of which - like national communities - must be imagined, as it stretches beyond the immediate experience of individuals. (ibid.: 74) Places are always distinct and singular, and by linking a people to a place, the people itself acquire a sense of distinctiveness (cf. Penrose 1995, Smith 1991).
In the present context, however, the concept of "place" does not merely connote the national territory. Of course, the national place is central in terms of identity, to the diaspora and to the local Latvians - but the two groups construct the national place as meaningful in very different ways, and, importantly, other places are being constructed as essential to the diaspora's identity. The definition of place inspiring the present study rests on the assumption that places are more than geography, they are also discursive projects of sensemaking. First, places are defined as geographical localities of various sizes (e.g., Latvia, Riga). Second, inextricably linked to the physical reality of places are the meanings people attach to them, i.e., places as cultural constructions and objects of human imagination and representation. Thus, I analyze narrative representations of places in terms of their ability to sustain meaning in terms of national identity.
No discussion of nations, national territories and national identity, is complete without a discussion of the phenomenon of "nationalism". Nationalism has been analyzed mainly as a large-scale phenomenon - as historical, political and cultural movements; as the ideological outcome of the essentializing naturalism of the Enlightenment; as the nation-building processes initiated by local intellectual elites in the 19th century; as related in various ways to the coming of modernity, of print-capitalism, of centralized power-structures, etc. Generally, most studies focus on processes of cause and effect, establishing historical and geographical typologies of nationalisms by focusing on various ways by which culture is essentialized and politicized (cf. Anderson 1983, Gellner 1983, Arnason 1990, Penrose 1995, Knudsen 1991, Eriksen 1993). In the case of Latvia, many scholars - including local intellectuals - have focused on national symbols or on the history of Latvian nationalism (cf. Norborg 1995, Kulis 1994, Priedite 1995). In the present study, however, nationalism is not the object of analysis. As ideology, nationalism was part of the Latvian context of the encounter and is only touched upon as such: as a contextual "backdrop" and a discourse from which the narratives draw authority and within which informants position themselves. Nationalism should thus be understood as the implicational space of the narratives analyzed below.
My general perspective on nationalism is inspired by recent studies by Michael Billig (1995) and Anthony P. Cohen (1996a). The main goal of Michael Billig's book Banal Nationalism is to liberate nationalism from its connotations of extremist, right-wing political ideology. One of the problems of this use is, he states, that it always seems to construct nationalism as "hot" or irrational, and, furthermore, usually "as the property of Others" (Billig 1995: 6). Billig introduces the broader concept of "banal nationalism" in order to emphasize that all types of nations must be reproduced as nations at a mundane or banal level. By introducing the idea of the "banal", he focuses on a mode of imagining communities which is less conspicuous than those characterized by historical movements, elitist rhetoric or explicit national symbolization. Billig believes, that "[…] the reproduction of a nation does not occur magically. Just as language will die for want of regular users, so a nation must be put to daily use"(ibid.: 6). "Banal practices" are the discursive, spatial and semantic practices which - at the level of the commonsensical - reproduce the nation.
By introducing the concept of personal nationalism, Cohen - like Billig - attempts to draw attention away from large scale political or historical models of nationalism, and toward "the association that individuals make between themselves and the nation" (1996a: 802). Whereas Billig attempts to position analysis at a level of everyday practice, Cohen positions his analysis at the level of the individual. Large scale approaches, Cohen claims, usually ignore the individual, and thus "[…] by understating the agency of the self in the construction of the nation, they risk misunderstanding nationalism itself"(ibid.: 804). The nation, he says, simply cannot exist without being reproduced through individual identifications with it. According to Cohen, we must focus on individual "sense-making agency"(ibid.: 804); on individual ideas of national membership, and national identity as intimately connected to agency and self-consciousness. To Cohen, nationalism is "a statement of identity, the potency of which is separate from - and independent of - its more partisan political programme" (ibid.: 803). When focusing on personal nationalism, the narrative analysis has a number of obvious advantages. Bruner and Gorfain state that "there is a dialogue between autobiography and history as each person is aligned with the prevailing cultural tradition; or, to put it in other terms, the national self is constituted through national stories." (1984: 60) Thus, taking a narrative approach to nationalism, the meanings and interpretations actively attached to national identity become visible where they must be reproduced: in the mouths of those who identify with the national community.
People, things and thoughts do not stay in place. They move or are moved in space, they change places. This mobility is not a new phenomenon - in the world or in anthropology. However, it is not until recently that anthropological inquiry has been directed at these movements and their wider implications as something other than marginal or anomalous phenomena - or as the normative practices of nomads. Among those preoccupied with such phenomena is James Clifford, who suggests that anthropologists should focus on two generalized forms of spatial practice; "travelling" and "dwelling" - as well as on their meanings and interrelations (Clifford 1992: 102). Clifford briefly mentions that the meanings attached to these practices may vary, as he suggests the existence of "negative and positive visions of travel: travel, negatively viewed as transience, superficiality, tourism, exile, and rootlessness […]; travel positively conceived as exploration, research, escape, transforming encounter" (ibid.: 105). Western and local Latvians attach quite different meanings to the practices and experiences of travelling and dwelling, meanings expressed through narratives of the relation between place and identity.
I met 84-year-old Inara, at a cocktail party at the offices of the World Federation of Free Latvians. Inara had lived in Sweden since 1944, and had been active in the Swedish Latvian Association for many years. In 1994, she returned to Latvia. This evening most of the attending crowd was Western Latvians of Inara's age. She told me that immediately after her family's escape from Latvia, they had lived in a displaced person's camp in Germany for 4 years.(25) Initially she had refused to unpack her suitcases, refusing to believe that the Soviet occupation of Latvia was more than "just a part of the general political mess after the war".
It took me more than two years before I realized that they [the Soviet forces] were actually going to stay in Latvia. I just didn't want to realize that the camp was all we had, and that Latvia was gone. I know that a lot of us felt that way. We felt that now we were the surviving remnant of Latvians in the world, and that we had to organize ourselves in order to preserve that heritage.
Many Western Latvian narratives described this shift from being Displaced Persons hoping for repatriation to highly organized diasporic communities engaged in "preserving the Latvian heritage" in the West.(26)
In 1995, the size of these communities varied, the largest being in Toronto, Canada and in major cities in California, New York and Illinois, U.S.A. However, even if the Latvian diaspora was concentrated in cities, no permanent "ethnic neighborhoods" - such as Little Italy or Chinatown in New York - were formed as urban home spaces of the diaspora (cf. Karklis, Streips & Streips 1978, Vagners 1984). Instead of particular neighborhoods or urban "ethnic villages", the nodal points of diasporic Latvian gatherings were solitary buildings: community centers, organizational headquarters and Lutheran churches. In most Latvian diasporic publications, these buildings are often foregrounded through photos, detailed descriptions, or even time of purchase, such as: "1951 - The legation of Latvia acquired its permanent quarters at 17th and Webster Streets, Washington, D.C."; "1952 - The American National Latvian League in Boston purchased its present home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts"; or "1955 - The Kalamazoo Latvian society purchased its own building" (Karklis, Streips & Streips 1974: 40-47, emphases added). As the quotes above indicate, the purchase of buildings constituted part of a practice of constructing permanent quarters, own buildings, communal homes to the diasporic communities, places which would constitute permanent sites for the maintenance of "Latvianness" within a context of "Americanness" or "Canadianness". These purchases were thus important examples of the reterritorialization of the displaced Latvians.(27)
Informants described the local community centers as the sites of their first experiences of collective Latvianness. In these centers, or in the Lutheran churches, they participated in various cultural activities: Sunday or Saturday "Latvian heritage schools" or evening high schools which offered classes in Latvian history, culture or "heritage language programs". Furthermore, the community centers organized Latvian choirs, musical or folk dance groups and forums for literary and artistic activities. (cf. Liepins 1984)
As suggested by Inara, the organization of these communities and the activities taking place here, was based on a diasporic perception of Latvia as a homeland that was "gone". This perception must be described in some detail, as it is closely linked to the problems experienced when the imagination of the homeland clashed with Latvian reality in the event of the diaspora's return.
As the displaced Latvians began to realize that "The Soviets" were not leaving Latvia, their view of the homeland changed. As a place where Latvian identity could be maintained, Latvia was nonexistent. This perception was also a recurring theme in the narratives of informants born in the West.
Mac was a 39-year-old American-Latvian who returned to Latvia in 1992. He was the director of a successful advertising agency in Riga which had three local Latvian employees. Mac was married to Mirdza, a Canadian-Latvian whom he had met at a Latvian song festival in Chicago. They had built a large house on the outskirts of Riga and with their baby son they lived comfortably off the company's profits. This comfortable lifestyle, he said, was the main reason why they "didn't escape from Latvia once more". During the interview Mac was tearful with frustrations about the local Latvians and what he called their "lack of moral", "Soviet ways of cheating and lying" and "complete idiocy". He also used the metaphor of "dying" to describe Latvia as it was represented to him within the diaspora.
We all sort of felt sorry for Latvia - the communist regime, and being a dying language, a dying culture, a dying country. We were told that we had to do our part to keep it up. That we were the surviving remnant and that if we didn't preserve Latvian identity, nobody would.
As in Inara's narrative, Mac saw the DP's and their descendants as the "surviving remnant" who would think of the population of Soviet Latvia with pity. However, this form of narrative construction of the homeland represented only one side of the story. Laura, a 33-year-old American-Latvian, was introduced to me by Love, an Australian-Latvian informant. Both worked at an office connected to the American government. Laura had been politically active in the Latvian-American Association and had gone to Riga as early as 1988 to participate in the ongoing struggle for Latvian independence. She said that she had always felt a bit confused about the way Latvia was represented within the diaspora, as the "demonization" of communist Latvia coexisted with the homeland represented as an idealized and romanticized place:
Soviet Latvia was almost taboo, really. It was Soviet! It was...dead, and you don't touch that! The conservative, well, pretty much the majority of the Latvians in the West said "No, this is not what we want to talk about". Latvia was simply a bad place. Almost simultaneously, they would talk about what they called the real Latvia - about how beautiful everything was, the landscapes, life there, the culture, the people. And of how this Latvia would be revived - by us, of course.
In informants' narratives, such positive representations of "our homeland","our virtuous people", "our ancient and unique culture", "our beautiful landscapes" - were frequently used to describe the images of "Latvia" which were transmitted to them in the diaspora.(28) It seems that this side of the representation was necessary, as deeming the homeland irreversibly "dead" would cause the myth of return to collapse, as there would be nothing left to return to. Therefore, representations of that which was destroyed but should be reinstated had to be included in the narrative construction of the homeland. To some younger informants, the constant emphasis on the myth of return and its significance to their sense of identity resulted in a feeling of homelessness. One such informant was Andrejs, who had been very emotional about the prospect of returning to Latvia, partially due to the diasporic myth of return:
As a child I heard all these wonderful stories about Latvia and always, though it was never directly spoken to me, there was always this feeling that one day we are going to go back, and then Latvia would once again be like it was in my grandfather's stories. To me, America was always a temporary home, just a stop-over. We were going to go back! If not, what was the point of keeping up this Latvian Thing?
Although Latvia was narrated as a dying or lost Eden, the diaspora still represented Latvia as its "real home" which would, eventually, be restored in the future event of independence and - importantly - the return of the diaspora. This duality provided the diasporic narratives of the homeland with a meaning, an order of time and place. When represented as a "demonic" place which destroyed identity, this narrative construction legitimized the escape as well as the postponement of return and, furthermore, necessitated the cultural practices of the diaspora in the West. Latvia of the past was lost and - due to the demonization of the homeland - Latvianness had to be reterritorialized. The narrative thus constructed the Latvianness of the present to be out of the hands of the homeland population, which provided the diasporic cultural practices with a sense of urgency or purpose and almost religious meaning. Furthermore, Andrejs' narrative was only one example of how the narrative construction of the homeland was transmitted to the generations born outside Latvia. It created a feeling of urgency, and a very personal sense of exile and homelessness. It is within this perceptual framework we should situate the various spatial and cultural practices emphasized in informants narratives. Generally, two forms of practices were narrated as crucial to the survival of Latvian identity: "dwelling" practices within urban diasporic communities and practices involving "travel" outside these communities. These travels are both national (travels within mostly the United States or Canada) and transnational (travels abroad).
Informants narrated their travel routes in the West as essential to their sense of belonging to a "national" community rather than merely to the "local" community of Latvians in their hometown. The practice of travel was often depicted as either travels within an organized network of cultural sites (which I term "culture routes") or visits to members of the diaspora, described by informants as an "extended family" (which I therefore term "family routes"). Both types of routes were narrated as providing a "passage to identity" - be it organized and collective or individual and spontaneous passages.
The culture routes consisted of group travels to "cultural sites", often arranged by the diasporic organizations. My use of the term "cultural sites" is inspired by Karen Fog Olwig, who defines these as "cultural institutions developed in the relationship between global and local ties" (1997: 17). Cultural sites are places in which people rarely live, but to which they attach significant cultural meaning. They are "focal points of identification", constituted by the fact that although people leave them behind and live elsewhere in the global space - they still define and visit them as important sites of cultural identification (Hastrup & Olwig 1997: 11; Olwig 1997: 34).(29) In informants' narratives, the most frequently mentioned cultural sites were: the yearly Latvian song festivals; the Latvian summer camps; the summer high schools and; (for the younger generations) the Latvian gymnasium in Münster, Germany and (for college-aged youth) the Latvian University in Michigan or the Latvian Cultural Seminars. The latter were yearly events taking place in North America, and consisted of an "intense ten-day immersion program into Latvian language and culture". Miezitis states that "many a youth has rediscovered his ethnic roots during one of these Latvian immersion experiences" (Miezitis 1984: 115). Informants also narrated the summer camps and the gymnasium in Münster as being such sites of "cultural immersion" into what they called "The Latvian Thing". Here they experienced a virtual heritage bombardment in the form of language-classes, teachings on Latvian culture: folk dances, the Dainas, folk music, folk art, etc.(30)
Aleksanders was only 31 years old at the time of my fieldwork, and though without formal journalistic education, he was a very influential news editor. He had been in Riga since 1992 and was married a local Latvian woman with whom he had a child. Aleksanders had quite wealthy parents, and had been educated at Harvard. Like Guntis, he was the manager of a mixed staff. He told me of his experiences with the diasporic culture routes:
In a sense, all these activities, the summer high schools, summer camps… in a lot of ways these places kept the language alive, but its main effect was that it created sort of a group consciousness for a lot of the people involved and solidified their identity as being Latvian. That was strong even for those who didn't speak Latvian. They all felt that they were part of this group. You know, you and me, every year, in all these different parts of the world.
Andrejs attached the same meanings to his experience of this type of travelling:
I went to my first Latvian song-festival and saw more Latvians than I ever knew existed. That was my national re-awakening! I met all these Latvians and sang all the songs and just got in touch with all this culture that I never really knew existed. Within my own family, we did all the same things, but it was only 20 people and this was Latvians all over!
The collective travels to cultural sites were in general interpreted and narrated as strengthening informants' social ties to the diaspora as a collectivity, due to the fact that the sites were defined by the collective presence and activities of the Latvians. Informants emphasized the significance of socializing exclusively with other Latvians for an extended period of time as an important experience of Latvianness as something shared. This social aspect of the cultural sites was often narrated as the most important addition to the cultural activities taking place there. As Vizma put it: "In a very real and wonderful sense I felt at home..."
Even though I didn't speak very much Latvian, I could see all the things going on around me, all the emotion and all the cultural aspects. And just among the people I found groups of people that I got along with very well, and I just felt really, really at home! Even among total strangers! The usual culture and history stuff became something which wasn't just happening in evening classes in Toronto, where the same people would talk about the same things. In the camps I realized that there were actually people I didn't know at all, who knew the same songs!
As mentioned, the travels along culture routes were organized by the Latvian diasporic organizations. The various media of the Latvian diaspora - newspapers, magazines, web-sites, etc. - charted the where and when a cultural site - a nodal point in time and space of Latvian collectivity - would emerge. If you went there at that time, you could maintain or discover your Latvianness and feel "at home" among other Latvians. Thus, the relation between place and identity emphasized in the theme of travel was that the diasporic organizations defined and created "chronotopical maps of Latvianness" in a global space (see Appendix C).(31) However, travels within this highly organized grid of "cultural chronotopes" was not the only form of spatial practice which informants narrated as important to their sense of belonging.
The sense of togetherness and shared identity experienced in the cultural chronotopes occasionally resulted in travels along family routes, which were narrated as being made alone or with a friend. As described below, the destinations of these routes were other Latvians in the West, sometimes "friends of friends of relatives"; people who by the sheer fact that they were Latvians became "part of the family" and their homes natural destinations for Western Latvian travellers.
Guntis was a 32-year-old American-Latvian political scientist, who had created a career for himself in Riga. By 1995 he had been living in Latvia for three years and was the head of an internationally sponsored NGO office with a mixed local/Western Latvian staff. He was married to a Canadian Latvian artist, and together they regarded life in Riga as "a challenge". Guntis was very self-assured, politically alert and constantly seeking influence through his position or participation in Latvian public debate. When talking about what he called his "evolution as a Latvian", he told me that his 1989 trip along family routes in Europe was what converted him:
After graduating from college I discovered my being Latvian for myself. I travelled around Europe for 5 months, staying mostly with Latvians in various places...with other Latvians in Munich, in France, in Sweden and in Bonn. I didn't really know them, they were friends of friends of relatives. But they were Latvian, and so was I.
Although critical towards various practices within the diaspora, Inese was also very positive about her feelings of belonging to an extended Latvian "family":
The thing is that within the Latvian community in the West it is "if you're Latvian, then you are part of the family. You can literally call these people up, who are not close family, and because such and such knows such and such, you're instantly invited in.
Informants recounted their travels to other Latvians as very intense experiences and often emphasized these travels as being individual routes, which were not on any "chronotopical map" created by the diaspora and thus providing a more "authentic" and "personal" feeling of belonging to a community.(32)
In summary, both travels along culture routes and travels along family routes were thematized as processes of discovery, of experiencing "Latvianness" as meaningful. However, although informants narrated their travels as a combination of the two types of routes, a distinction was made between the types of experience these routes provided. The family routes were narrated as giving an intimate and personal experience of belonging, while the culture routes - via the emphasis on cultural immersion and intense social interaction with a large number of people - provided a sense of belonging to a collective identity.
Identification in cultural chronotopes
As suggested in Chapter Two, the present study defines the concept of "place" relationally by focusing on how people relate to and make places meaningful. Such a definition is close to that made by Marc Augé, who introduces the concept of "anthropological places", which are " places of identity, of relations and of history" (Augé 1995: 52). These are places characterized - through human practice - by residence, by relations between inhabitants, by a certain permanence in time (history), and by the fact that they are made meaningful by inhabitants as "having" a certain identity - and simultaneously "giving" inhabitants identity. Anthropological places are defined by the ways people relate and apply meaning to them, and furthermore in relation to the concept of "non-places". Augé describes the distinction as follows: "If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place." (ibid.: 79). Non-places are various forms of "transitory sites", which we all, according to Augé, encounter with increasing frequency in our postmodern lives: hotels, airports, train stations, waiting rooms, refugee camps, etc. Augé warns, that these concepts should not be understood too rigorously, as "place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased and the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsest on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten." (ibid.: 79). I believe that if we construct a continuum of relations to place stretching from these two - never erased or completed - extremes, one of the parameters of such a continuum would be time. The "cultural chronotopes of Latvianness" created by the diaspora could thus be described as a type of relation to place constructed in between "anthropological" places and "non"-places. The Latvian summer camps or the hotels where the Latvian song festivals are held are transitory, but - as they are sites of identification, of reproducing identity and history - they are not as transitory as motels or airports. Concepts such as temporary cultural sites or, as suggested above, "cultural chronotopes" can be used instead of anthropological places. At these sites, the history and "culture" related to another place (Latvia) is retold and staged in order to create temporary - or precarious - sites of social relations and identification. The camps and the hotels are sites in which the mentioned properties of anthropological places are temporarily reconstructed in order to create a sense of community. If you travel there two weeks after the event, it is once again a non-place, existing only in diasporic memory as a cultural site connected to the reproduction or transmission of Latvian "heritage".
Related to these spatial practices was the fact that many Western Latvian informants used the concept of "The Latvian Thing" to describe everything from internal feelings of belonging to cultural practices and politics in the diaspora. A few informants said that this was just a matter of speaking. However, most suggested this as one of their main motivations for going to Latvia: to escape Latvianness as a conscious and compartmentalized practice - a "thing" - taking place in cultural chronotopes. Instead, they said, they wished to feel Latvianness as an integrated and all-encompassing identity and to experience a different and more permanent relation to place - to Latvia.
Before the 1991 independence, Latvia was not a central site in the circuits of diaspora's routes. When Latvia "emerged" from the Soviet space, it immediately became the place to visit. Five was 42 years old at the time of my fieldwork and was born and raised in Canada by Latvian parents. She had come to Latvia in 1992, and had stayed only because she met and married a local Latvian man. She did administrative work in a college-level educational institution, which was funded by the European Union. We met at her office, and she appeared rather confused and slightly frustrated about her situation, as life in Latvia made her both euphoric and depressed. Therefore, she frequently returned to Canada "when things got too depressing". However, contrary to the mixed feelings she was experiencing in 1995, she said that her motives for going to Latvia in 1992 were emotionally univocal:
I used to be very preoccupied with Latvianness, with the community and our identity and I travelled everywhere to keep this thing up. But the biggest moment was one day, when the Latvian independence movement was growing, and you would see Latvia with its boundaries on TV, it was very touching and it moved something within me, the whole Latvian thing became more real. And I felt that I really had to go here.
Five's motivation for going to Latvia resemble Bruner's findings on the African-American diaspora's visits to the slave dungeons in Ghana: such a visit to the homeland is regarded as a "necessary act of self-realization" (Bruner 1996:291). As is the case in Bruner's study, the Western Latvians often expressed their expectations of a visit to (or stay in) Latvia in highly emotional terms. Especially when informants had no previous experience with Latvia, the imagination played large role in the narratives of what one was to achieve at this ultimate - and permanent - immersion site. In the narratives, the meanings and expectations attached to the trip had the pathos one would expect to find in connection with religious pilgrimages. However, in the case of the Latvian diaspora, rather than religious enlightenment the goal of the pilgrimage was the quest for the experience of a pure "Latvian identity".
Although rarely mentioned in narratives of this and other types of "pilgrimage", money is involved in almost all types of travel. As mentioned in Chapter One, the majority of Western Latvian informants were middle class or upper middle class and in some ways the spatial practices described above may have had some influence on this fact. However, informants disagreed as to whether or not this is the case. Some informants claimed that the Latvian diaspora was upper middle class and that this was the reason for their over-representation in Latvia. According to Inese: "Latvians are very versatile, they are like cats, they land on their feet, they will get somewhere and as I said now they are presidents of important organizations and doctors and architects. Very hard-working". This tale was told by other informants and seemed to be a widespread self-representation within the diaspora. However, other informants claimed that lower class stories were excluded from this representation, and that the reason for this and for the "capsized" class representation among the returnees was simple: travelling to the various cultural chronotopes to participate in key events was a costly affair and constituted a substantial burden on a family's economy. Alexanders explained:
In the Western Latvian communities I was told that all Latvians were upper middle class. But there was a natural selection, because The Latvian Thing wasn't cheap. If you were going to different songfestivals each year, most of them would not be in your city or even in your country - you had to fly and stay in a hotel. It was only the upper-middle class who could really afford to maintain all these social ties, which was actually quite an expensive proposition. So over the years, quite a lot of families have stopped participating, and they have simply disappeared from these extended Latvian social circles.
Diasporas live in a complex space constituted by practices of both dwelling and travelling and neither of these practices alone can be said to characterize the experience of the Latvian diaspora. Informants narrated their practices of identification as being connected to relations to various places; the homeland, the local community centers and the cultural "sites" or "chronotopes" in the West. As a result of this central role of travel in the diasporic processes of identification, the economy of the individual family became one of the factors which would ultimately determine whether or not you could "stay Latvian" in the United States or in Canada.
The narratives of Western Latvian identity were thematically dominated by extra-ordinary practices: travels to various sites, cultural events or activities taking place at weekends or during holidays rather than during the working week. Dwelling in "Western" everyday life was generally omitted from or backgrounded in the narratives. However, as will be shown below, local informants generally rejected any of these types of travel as practices capable of reproducing identity, and emphasized that which was played down or omitted in diasporic narratives: the fact that they had lived an everyday life outside Latvia.
Before going further, my use of the term "dwelling" must be clarified. It is used broadly - signifying both the practice of inhabiting a place as well as the various meanings attached to this practice. By using this definition, I wish to make the narrative construction of place as meaningful central in my analysis by looking at how informants emphasized specific relations between themselves and their "habitat". Dwelling thus functions as an analytical frame for the various meanings local Latvians attach to the fact that they - unlike the diaspora - have lived and live in Latvia. Furthermore, I analyze how this is made meaningful in terms of national identity.(33)
Kolja, a 25-year-old local Latvian, was attending a course in engineering at the time of my fieldwork. He was a gentleman in a quite "old fashioned" manner, and insisted on bringing coffee for "the ladies" (Aija and I). When he finally sat down, he said, loudly, to make himself heard above the disco music from the café's speakers: "You don't become a Latvian by travelling in America!" According to him, the "natural fact" that leaving your homeland inevitably leads to a loss of identity had been proven by his experiences with his American-Latvian aunt and uncle, who had just been staying at his parents house for two weeks:
It is clear that one can only keep one's identity for some time outside Latvia. Those who escaped to the West might say that they are still Latvians, but really, I think that is a little sad, because when they come to Latvia, everybody can see that they have lost that identity. They have lived abroad for too long, they are Americans now, Westerners. You can see it in the way they act and talk, in the way that they just don't understand things here.
In general, local informants positioned themselves in opposition to the idea that identity could be maintained outside Latvia and their comments were often explicitly directed at the fact that the diaspora lived (and travelled) in "foreign" places. Furthermore, they usually dismissed the idea that travels to Latvia would change what they saw as an assimilated identity.
Kara, a 54-year-old local Latvian ecologist (by education) and nationalist politician dismissed the Western Latvians' claim that they had preserved and cultivated their Latvian identity in their Western communities. She transformed the metaphor of roots into a biological reality:
I have a very clear idea of what Latvianness is. I think in categories of people, species of people who are made, influenced by their environment. The place is mirrored in the people. That is what is meant by being rooted somewhere. When you have lived in a given territory for many generations, you are formed by this territory. You keep your "Latvian form" for one or two generations - even if you are living in other places, if you have lost your roots. It's like a flower - it can only live for some time outside its soil. After a long time away from Latvia, you must return before it is too late. For most of the Latvians coming from the West, it is too late. I can feel that - and see it too. I can feel when somebody is Latvian, but I can't tell you how I do it. I have this knowledge from living on this territory, from my roots. You have to live in a place if you are to have the identity of that place. You can only destroy that identity by forcing people away from the territory, by cutting off their roots.
In the event of displacement one becomes uprooted. This is why, in Kara's view, the diaspora could only be separated from Latvia for a given period of time. After that, the Latvian identity erodes and becomes substituted by the "identity" of the other place. In Kara's narrative, the symbiotic relationship between place and identity is determined by a person's actual presence in the "identity-place".
A recurring theme in local Latvian narratives was the notion that staying "at home", in what was narrated as the true and proper place of Latvian identity, was crucial to its maintenance. Despite the fact that informants often emphasized the symbolic and political deterritorialization resulting from the Soviet occupation, they usually narrated Soviet Latvia as having remained a place of Latvian identity, and thus countered the diaspora's claims that Soviet Latvia was not a place in which Latvianness could survive.
Einars was a 45-year-old local Latvian writer and journalist. He lived from various free-lance jobs, giving courses for aspiring writers and writing columns or essays for various newspapers and magazines. Einars said that he had been discussing the issue of "identity" with both Western Latvian relatives as well as with various Western Latvians he had met in his capacity as journalist. He said that he had disagreed with most of their claims, and he opposed the Western Latvian representation of a "dying Latvia" with an account of his own experience of flying from Riga to Moscow:
It's not true that one could not be Latvian here! During Soviet times, I flew from Riga to Moscow and I could tell where the border was just by looking down. The difference between the mentality of the Russians and our mentality was very obvious from above. You could see how we have always been hard-working, and how the Russians are too lazy to work on the land. In Latvia everything looked kept and cultivated, there were lots of beautiful farms. And all of a sudden there's this wasteland, Russia! It is very visible, where Latvia stops and Russia starts. And that is because we are very different in our natures when it comes to work.
Einars narrated his experience of the "border" between Soviet Russia and Soviet Latvia as an experience of crossing a "boundary" between identities, between Latvian and Russian "natures". This construction of Latvia as a distinct place in which a distinct Latvian identity was reproduced during the Soviet occupation was also put forward by Raitis, 39, a local Latvian computer specialist, who had worked in various locations within the Soviet Union. At the time of my fieldwork, he was "temporarily without employment".(34) According to Raitis:
We always kept being Latvian. After all, even in Soviet times, Latvia was still here, wasn't it? I mean, the landscapes, the buildings, the language … our Latvian identity. When I went to Lithuania, I always knew that I wasn't in Latvia anymore, and that things were different there, the language, the customs … it was a different place and people there were just different. Of course, some things were the same because we were oppressed by the Soviet Union - but even then, Lithuania and Latvia were still two different nations.
Raitis linked the continuity of Latvian identity to the continuity of Latvia as a distinct place. Furthermore, in his narrative, the place became synonymous with identity. Most local narratives reproduced this essentializing notion of territorial identities, very often indirectly through descriptions of what they perceived as substantial differences between national identities within the Soviet Union.(35)
It is worth mentioning that Soviet ideological discourse on the national question often emphasized that within the Soviet socialist state the boundaries between nations were substituted by borders signifying nothing but territorial demarcations of administrative units: "While capitalism [marks] boundaries, Lenin stressed, socialism demarcates borders […]" (Fedoseyev 1977: 207). According to anthropologist Anthony Cohen, the difference between borders and boundaries is that borders are "matters of fact", geographically demarcated lines, whereas
boundaries are the subjects of claim based on a perception by at least one of the parties of certain features - diacritical features - which distinguish it from others. Whether it refers to a collective condition, such as ethnic group identity, or to a more ephemeral 'personal space', boundary suggests contestability, and is predicated on consciousness of a diacritical property [Cohen 1994: 63].
While Soviet discourse claimed that only geographical borders existed between territorial units, Einars' and Raitis' narratives suggested a continued reproduction of boundaries which was invested with meaning in terms of identity. The "border" between Soviet Latvia and Russia was narrated as a boundary, a meaningful marker of distinction and difference between the "natures" on either side.
Some local informants narrated Soviet Latvia as an identity-place "threatened" by cultural and demographic changes - by the influx of Russians and other Soviet "foreigners". Nevertheless, the implications of this were usually backgrounded, and almost all local informants narrated Latvia as having survived as an "anthropological place" in the face of this threat. This narrative of survival was often connected to a specific spatial practice which I - inspired by Clifford - call "dwelling".
In almost all local narratives on Latvia and Latvianness, informants foregrounded the experiential themes of "being at home","everyday" or "ordinary life" - themes which suggested a specific perception of the relation between place and identity. The notions were frequently used to express experience of Latvia as an ordinary and familiar lived space - a type of experience which was explicitly contrasted with both the Soviet system and with the practices of the diaspora.
Mara was the 67-year-old sister of my landlady, Anna. She was a pensioner, having retired from her position as a medical doctor. She had met several Western Latvians at Anna's place, which she frequently visited. She said about life and Latvianness during the Soviet occupation:
I didn't walk around feeling like a Soviet person. It was just ordinary Latvian life. I'm Latvian, I always knew that. When I got on a tram back then, it was in Riga, right? It was in Latvia, so this tram was Latvian. I didn't think, that this tram has been built after the Soviet occupation, so it must be a Soviet tram. That's stupid. Things were Latvian here and most of the ordinary things we did were Latvian.
A similar narrative concerning this issue was presented by Einars, who said: "Perhaps you can say that some of my life was Soviet. But to me it was Latvian. When I was a member of Komsomol(36)… it was just part of life, meeting other young people, going to different places and so on. Inside ourselves we know that back then a lot of the time it was just everyday life." Einars narrated his activities in Komsomol as practices which did not turn him into a "Soviet" person. He stated that it was simply part of an "ordinary life" which he then framed as being "Latvian". In both Mara's and Einars' narratives, living in Latvia was characterized as "ordinary" experience, a type of experience which they refused to define as "Soviet". Inhabiting Latvia, going to school, to work, shopping, falling in love and getting married - all these practices were narrated as "Latvian life".
Constructing everyday life as a field in which the locals retained control, if not over the shape of things or practices, then over the meanings attached to them, is comparable to Anthony Cohen's idea of "interpretive subversion" (1996: 807). Cohen states, that there is a difference between the representations of states and individual interpretations of these, and continues: " […] we listen to our leaders' vacuous rhetorics and render it meaningful by attributing our own sense to it, so that the sense we hear in the words being uttered is ours, not theirs. We hear their voices but listen to ourselves." (ibid.: 807). Cohen's statements concern rituals and symbols, but can be transferred to the local Latvian narratives of everyday life practices. The examples above are Mara's and Einars' "Latvianizing" interpretations of joining Komsomol or riding the tram. Their everyday life was a realm of life in which they had control over the meanings they attached to this life - and over their interpretations of it. They claimed to have been, with Cohen's terms, "listening to themselves" in their capacity as Latvians.